SL-I depicts a story that is stranger than fiction, completely absurd--and true: the story of America's first nuclear reactor accident, an incident that occurred on January 3, 1961 and escaped public attention for some twenty years. Filmmakers Diane Orr and C Larry Roberts utilized the Freedom of Information Act to investigate what Newsweek characterized as a bizarre murder-suicide, perpetrated by one of the operators of a nuclear reactor on a military site in the Idaho desert. The explosion, which resulted from someone lifting the very heavy central control rod from the reactor core, killed three men and began a grisly clean-up effort that within weeks had significantly contaminated hundreds of people.
SL-I is an investigatory piece that is constructed as a pseudo-investigatory piece, combined with elements of ersatz film noir. The activities surrounding the explosion are reenacted and filmed so as to heighten the other-worldliness of a high radiation zone, while underscoring the fact that it was treated as a manageable clean-up operation by men wearing masks and carrying portable Geiger-counters. Though it features archival footage and contemporary interviews with people involved with the clean-up, SL-I makes no pretense to “objectivity”; rather, it is a refreshing statement of the absurdity of the belief that human beings can deal with a nuclear accident, when “a simple Christian act” can start an endless chain reaction of contamination. Whether or not the SL-I incident was a murder-suicide attempt is probably overexplored in the film, for whatever human impulse or error triggered it, the explosion--and the clean-up--disturbingly demonstrate that human reactions and nuclear reactors just don't mix. (JB)